The KDE community todayreleased KDE 3.5.8. While the developers' main focus lies on finishing KDE 4.0, the stable 3.5 series remains the desktop of choice for the time being. It is proven, stable and well supported. The 3.5.8 release with its literally hundreds of bugfixes has again improved the users' experience. The 3.5.8 info page lists how to get the sources and distribution packages.

The main focus of improvements for KDE 3.5.8 is

Improvements in Konqueror and its web browsing component KHTML. Bugs in handling
HTTP connections have been fixed, KHTML has improved support
of some CSS features for more standards compliance.

In the kdegraphics package, lots of fixes in KDE's PDF viewer and Kolourpaint, a painting
application, went into this release.

The KDE PIM suite has, as usual, seen numerous stability fixes, covering KDE's email client
KMail, the organizer application KOrganizer and various other bits and pieces.

I find that there are some issues with supporting libraries that are going to need to be addressed if that is going to be a reality. Such issues might be fixed by the maintainers of the libraries or the problems might continue to occur with other libraries.

It appears that the problems with aRts and Glib have been resolved which is good to see although I'm not clear on exactly how it was fixed.

I note that I build from source so some of these problems may have been fixed by your distro. I am still having multimedia issues (not all of them KDE).

Kaboodle and Noatun have simply quit working although the embedded audio player still works. I haven't been able to figure out the cause. This isn't a large issue since Kaffine and KPlayer work fine.

KView and KPat won't open JPEG files. This must be a specific issue with imlib since some other KDE apps have no problems. I also don't seem to get new thumbnails of JPEG files which probably isn't an imlib issue.

KDELibs won't build against the current version of LibArt_LGPL. It is possible that this is only a header issue.

Yes, I need to write bugs for these as well as do further research to find the exact causes.

"Kaboodle and Noatun have simply quit working although the embedded audio player still works. I haven't been able to figure out the cause. This isn't a large issue since Kaffine and KPlayer work fine"

Kaboodle and Noatun both uses aRts while Kaffine and KPlayer don't, so your aRts install is most likely not correct. Or something is preventing aRts from accessing the soundcard.

What you mean by the embedded audio player, im not sure. But if it's something browser embedded, it's most likely handled by Kaffine and KPlayer. If it's system sounds, they may be configured to play directly with alsaplay or something going directly to your soundcard.

The "Test Sound" button in the "Sound System" plays a sound, so I doubt that aRts is totally broken as you presume. Also, the System Notifications work.

However, this might be an aRts issue. I am using the current SVN branch 1.5.

Actually the name is "Embedded Media Player(Kaboodle Component)". This ships with KDE. I think that the same code is used for the "Navigation Panel" "Media Player" and the "Previews". However, I note that EMP(KC) only works for audio, trying to play a video results in Konqueror hanging.

Originally, all KDE sound went through aRts. I don't know what currently uses aRts and what doesn't if KDE is built "--with-arts". If this works for you, what aRts version are you using and where did you get it?

Yes, you are right your aRts are not totally broken, but your KDE install clearly is. The full name of Embedded Media Player spells it out, Kaboodle Component or in technical terms the Kaboodle kpart. You have the kpart working, but not the standalone player using the kpart. Don't you find theat a little odd? Sounds like you have multiple versions lying around,linking issues, broken Sycoca database, old broken .desktop files or a combination of those issues.

I don't think using Kaboodle(embedded or not) playing video will work very well, the video support in aRts newer reached it's potential. Not sure if it's even works/are enabled anymore. Try using Kaboodles video brother Codeine for that.

As for aRts usage, the programs in the kdemultimedia package uses it. Kaboodle Noatun and JuK(JuK can alsouse direct output with the akode lib). Amarok can use multiple backends, but usually defaults to Xine not aRts. All the video players(Codeine,Kaffeine, KPlayer, KMPlayer etc.) use Xine or MPlayer. One neat but not to commonly used trick is that Xine actually can use aRts as output for sound, and it solves the old problem of applications locking the sound device(I think more use of this would have lesend some of aRts historic bad reputation).

I have never actually had any major problems with aRts, either self compiled or as distribution packages all the wayfrom the KDE2 days. On this machine I'm currently using aRts 1.5.8 and KDE 3.5.8, from backports Suse 10.1.

I'm having this same problem with OpenSUSE. Not all of my sounds work at the moment. Amarok w/gstreamer is fine, but I don't have any system sounds, even tough the "test" buttong in the kde control center module works to play a sound. Any fixes for this yet?

The "longer life" of the 3.5 branch is indeed an excellent news. IMHO, and although the 4.x serie is very promising, this branch is actually the most complete and most convincing alternative to proprietary solutions, for home-users and corporate users.

I want to thank you all KDE guys and girls and allow myself to stress how much KDEPIM (and the synchronization part) is a decisive piece to improve for wider adoption in corporations (with Koffice of course) !

I'd say the same as Boudewijn, newer had any problems and the speed is good.

On the other hand I have seen "speed problems" and lots of timeout problems on some sites with Konqueror, while other browsers like Opera or Firefox are ok. But that has always been easily solved by disabling IPv6 support in KDE, still lot of equipment out there not handling it well.

I'm saving money to send another donation. KDE rocks.!! This release shows how KDE E.V. is professional and responsible with the users. KDE 4 is a huge chalange, but the bug hunting and developing of 3.5 is on the road.

Please, update this page. It stopped at kde 3.3.2 and display Conectiva Linux as a linux distribution with KDE.

Really, i cant stand all those other Desktops anymore... Whenever i try another Desktop (or operating system without KDE), i begin to miss several features after a short time and then i just feel the urge to throw it all away... Well, no bashing, but the conclusion that KDE is simply perfect for me :-)

One big thing that bothers me for a long time now is Konquerors profile management, and i still hope that this will be fixed somehow...

Its nearly impossible to have independent konqueror profiles, like having different toolbars per profile, at least not without some "hacking" on the config files like described here:

This "hack" works, but not for every setting... It would be optimal to have some sort of profile management like in KDE4's Konsole, where you can edit *every* setting _per profile_, like toolbars, the tabbar and various settings...

One other thing that may be worth fixing is some kind of DNS cache built into the kio slaves. You can do this by running pdnsd externally or just using a proxy server, but that's additional work on the user side.

Well I use konqui for browsing but the thing Jan describes is a bit enerving indeed.

As was said before, it's buggy version check. Since the UA includes Gecko, it assumes that it's a Mozilla browser. I guess this was intentional (I rarely see a page that works in FF and not Konqueror), but has some unintentional results.

these stats are not perfect... they represent only an small sample of the internet population.

looking at browser stats for http://dot.kde.org/ or for http://slashdot.org/ would give totally different results. while those two I just mentionned would give interresting results I'd be happy to look at. The #1 interresting browser stats I'd like to check is those cumulated by the famous http://google.com/ domain ;)

Yes, I like the 3.5.8 KDE release. However, it broke System Settings, which when access via K Menu produces a Crash Handler. This problem has been reported to launchpad. This problem was not present until I upgraded to 3.5.8. It would be nice if the problem was identified and fixed ASAP, please????